“The ugly tan leather and stitching is still there, but Apple has a new feature for its Find My Friends app that users will find pretty useful,” Buster Heine reports for Cult of Mac.

“Apple just updated Find My Friends so that users can setup up geofences and receive a notification once a friend leaves a designated area,” Heine reports. “Users have always been able to create location-based alerts, but Find My Friends 2.1 now lets users adjust the sensitivity of an alert by setting an exact distance threshold.”

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Were you around when Next Generation was starting?
Or what’s your equivalent — something with cool futuristic sets… real “gee whiz” factor. Maybe the last Star Trek movie? Or the upcoming one? Maybe Iron Man’s suit — and how they’ve animated it to install itself in that extremely futuristic manner.

Now — imagine the bridge of the Enterprise with red velvet stuffed Victoria armchairs — Picard or the young Kirk wearing button-up cardigans like Mr. Rogers — the control done with tan leather and stitching — and everything else done with a similar theme. Not a cool steampunk theme — just a banal theme of furniture and office gear ranging from Victorian times up to the seventies. Imagine Iron Man suiting up by pulling on each item, finished with clipping the boots on like ski boots. How UTTERLY flat that would be! How boring and banal. That does NOT give the interesting, cool, futuristic environment we want when watching Star Trek or anything like that. We hear a thud like a suet pudding as that show hits the trash can.

THAT’S why people get their knickers in a twist about skeuomorphism. Not the functional parts that aid understanding – like an icon with a book on it. But the meaningless decoration like faux leather. It’s just so utterly flat and backward looking. Blech.

But faux-leather isn’t “now”; it just looks like cheap kitsch. Reel to reel tape recorders aren’t now, except in a highly specialized sense. I theorize a lot of younger people may not even know what one is!🙂 A digital representation of a ripped paper page isn’t “now”.

In Time Machine, we go zooming through a star field, with a perspective “3D” bar at the bottom and the clean scale on the right. Away with it!!! Let’s have a faux leather background, with the “torn page” effect and a list of numbers on the right that look like an old typewriter. Yeah! That’s the ticket.

Last complaint for now — the clash between the two. Some parts of the interface are clean and modern: Time Machine with a star field, iTunes and more. On the other hand, faux leather and torn pages. Clash, clash and blech!

They have to run the app to approve your request to be tracking them when you first start out, but the app doesn’t have to be actively running on their phone after that for you to be able to track them. I know my brother-in-law doesn’t always have it on and I can check if he’s on his way in the car-pool. This app doesn’t suck at all it works great. Your friends may have changed their settings to “hide from followers” so as not to be followed by you when they don’t want to be and don’t want to tell you, but it’s not because the app is not on.